An ordinary meeting of the Society was held on 31st October at the Ampfield Golf Club. The President was in the chair. The presenters at this meeting were Drs Claire Holton, Rosalind Henderson, Liam Jones and Isabel Dugdale who, as medical students, had received Foott Memorial Bursaries to study abroad.
Claire Holton visited the Kisiizi Hospital in Uganda which had been flooded and destroyed and rebuilt just before she arrived. The hospital provides general services and has 42,000 patients. It is also the only psychiatric hospital in Uganda. Claire elected to spend time in psychiatry and obstetrics. She said that alcohol problems, violent crime and its consequences, poverty causing late presentations, and illegal abortion were common in Uganda. She spent 3 weeks with the community outreach teams. They visited communities 3 times a week providing psychiatric, where they saw over 100 patients a day, maternity and paediatric care and physio outreach. In her obstetric attachment she spent time in the Mothers Waiting House where mothers would come from afar early in their pregnancy and stay until delivery for a one off payment. It was a service conceived to try and overcome the consequences of delayed presentation of serious obstetrical problems many of which carry a high mortality for mother and child. She is still in touch with the hospital and she thanked the Society for the bursary.
Roz Henderson visited India and Sri Lanka. In India she spent 2 weeks at the Nishtha Rural Health, Education and Environment Centre. It is very remote. They provide health services in their daily clinics, education to the local community teaching them about their bodies and how to stay healthy as well as teaching organic vegetable gardening. They also support the education of children and youth to prepare them for a modern world. Roz worked in the clinic where a wide range of different treatments were used; classical medicine, herbal treatments, acupuncture and traditional treatment- such as cottage cheese for mastitis and cabbage leaves for arthritis. She did home visits hiking up mountains to get there and went on first aid training days. She then transferred to Sri Lanka to the Jaffna teaching hospital for 2 weeks O&G and then 2weeks in the psychiatry department which she said was the most difficult thing she did. She attended outpatients and visited inpatients ,where the conditions were very poor with barred windows and patients chained to beds. In the evenings she met with other medical students for teaching sessions with each other. She thanked the Society for the bursary.
Liam Jones went to Palawan in the Philippines to study emergency medicine. It is wet and humid so malaria and dengue are endemic. He visited the Adventist Hospital where there is a focus on health and wellbeing and a vegetarian diet. He worked in the ER which is staffed by SHOs and interns only, working in 24 hour shifts and then 24 hours off. The patients are diagnosed and treatment is initiated in the ER. They can refer patients to a consultant for a review. Liam was surprised by the skills of his fellow doctors who had learnt to perform so many different invasive investigations and treatments themselves. He was seeing severe RTAs, work injuries, dog bites with the possibility of rabies, CVAs, suicide attempts, which are frequent, and dengue. He also presented 2 interesting cases, one of severe dengue and the other of hydranencephaly. He thanked the Society for the bursary
Isabel Dugdale was unable to attend and sent an audio presentation by email. She attended the Hemas Hospital in Galle in Sri Lanka for 6 weeks. She was in the emergency assessment centre which involved dealing with numerous RTAs and also surfing injuries. There was also an epidemic of tonsillitis and a number of cases of dengue. She then returned to UK to spend 3 weeks with the NHS organ donation and transplant service. She shadowed the paediatric ICU team, the neuro ICU team and had a week at their operations centre in Bristol. She thanked the Society for her bursary.
The President and Dr Harnish Patel then withdrew to review the presentations and they awarded the prize for the best presentation to Dr Clare Holton. There being no other business the meeting was closed at 10.00pm